Summary: Another sign of Microsoft's arrogance is its official reply to well-founded accusations of misconduct

FOR THOSE just joining, here are some background posts that outline Glyn Moody's attempt to bring ODF to the UK authorities:

• Proprietary Software Falters
• Microsoft Lobbies Come Under Fire by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and Linux Journal
• Microsoft UK's Chief 'Accomplice' Jumps Ship

As that last link indicates, Richard Steel quit very suddenly, so Moody sent his feedback directly to Microsoft, which would not prove especially helpful. Prior to that, Glyn Moody showed a series of misconduct (OOXML incidents) from Microsoft, but Microsoft, in response, totally neglects to address them (see the new update at the bottom). To make matters worse, Microsoft turned accusations against it into another PR stunt/effort, wanting/claiming credit for harmful intervention in ODF. Microsoft only ruins ODF interoperability with its 'MSODF' implementation [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7], all of which is completely beside the point. What is probably most telling are the many irregularities the company cannot retract or refute; not even an apology here is indicative of attitudinal issues.

In IDG, an article was published suggesting that Microsoft should get its act together and fix its broken implementation of ODF.

2) Be sure and make the upcoming free Web version of Office 2010 work with the world-standard Open Document Format (ODF) and the open source OpenOffice and its related alternatives from Day 1. The rest of the world believes in ODF and its lovely file compatibility to make it much easier for users anywhere to share their documents without vendor lock-in and problems. You began working on this in earnest with Office 2007 Service Pack 2, but its time to really hit the ball a mile. No more half attempts just to try to score some points. Instead, make ODF compliance a key feature and watch Office 2010 head out of the sales park.

John Cody, an Albany-based Attorney (New York State Office of the Chief Information) writes: "Reading "interop" blogs & shaking my head-why do vendors spend so much time on OOXML and OOXML interop when ODF is the only ISO document format?"

New York has already produced relevant reports in the past -- ones which were favourable to ODF. Here is another new example of ODF support:

Spanish open source project featuring an ODF viewer for JavaME phones.

ODF has had many big wins recently. Standing in the way of its adoption are poor-yet-ubiquitous implementations such as Microsoft's, which is designed to work only with Microsoft. ⬆

"I have lost my sleep and peace of mind for last two months over these distasteful activities by Microsoft."

--Professor Deepak Phatak